Cosmos Episode 2: More Simplistic Assertions

Natural selection tends toward stasis, over thousands and even millions of years. This is a well know fact among paleontologists. For Neil Tyson to extrapolate the idea that pressures educed by selective breeding, which produced remarkable changes in the species canine, to the conclusion that similar forces were necessarily employed and maintained on natural selection, barely takes into account the obvious: the primary catalyst for these grand evolutionary achievements is nothing less than intelligence, in the form of volitional agents. The fact that humans altered the appearance of a single species, in very rapid fashion, tells us little about what may or may not have taken place naturally. We can, however, examine quite a revealing snapshot of this pre-history in the fossil record. What story does it tell?

To the point, Dr. Tyson completely glosses over the fact that the primary mechanism of evolution—human selective breeding in this case—elicited more changes in Canis lupus, over a relatively brief period, than did natural selection in all of human pre-history. This, in fact, is exactly what makes his chosen example so remarkable. Like most species, the wolf remained quite static in appearance, throughout its pre-human history, and it continues to do so even today. The fossil record evinces precisely this conclusion: a striking longevity of individual species, perhaps followed by rapid speciation is quite ordinary. The primary question therefore remains: Could natural selection manufacture the same variability in canines as Artificial—intelligent—Selection has proven to achieve, given enough time? It is difficult to say for certain; but, the answer, for now, seems to be, no.

Certainly, selective pressures, so called, were involved—even paramount I suppose—in order for evolutionary change to naturally occur; nevertheless, the process of descent with modification, driven by natural selection, winnowing random genetic mutation—as Alvin Plantinga explains—has never been demonstrably shown to produce the kind of dramatic morphological changes seen in Dr. Tyson’s example of canine breeding. To anyone but the most ardent Darwinian apologist, it is apparent that Neil simply misuses the data to bolster his rather tenuous assertions regarding Natural Selection. On my view—and that of many other theists—descent with modification and natural selection are relatively uncontroversial—it is the assumption that random, unguided, genetic modifications have produced all the diversity we see, rather, that is in question.

  

Compare the more conspicuous agent elicited changes that, from the wolf, produced a St. Bernard, a Pit Bull, and a Chihuahua, with the rather modest evolutionary changes in Neil’s second illustration pertaining to bear fur color variability. Dr. Tyson utilizes the former to make his point; then moves seamlessly to the more modest exemplar to show how the “awesome power of natural selection” operates of its own accord. Though somewhat analogous, this trivial representation of evolution concerning darker bears (struggling to survive in snowy environs) giving way to lighter colored bears, pales in comparison—both literally and figuratively—to the former illustration of evolution by way of artificial selection. And what’s more, Dr. Tyson’s first example, the dog, is still, for all practical purposes—even after numerous impressive changes like those presented in this episode—the same species as the gray wolf. In spite of its diminutive appearance, a Chihuahua my yet be paired with a wolf to produce offspring. These striking morphological changes have not caused a new species to arise. Does selection have the power to do so? Perhaps, and perhaps not.

 

Who can blame Dr. Tyson here, for overplaying his hand and appealing to the sensational? After all, there are few, if any, comparable instances of evolution, so called, in the history of vertebrates. Try as we may, no one has ever found the requisite missing links in the fossilized record that Darwinian style gradualism must have generated, and that aplenty. The fossil record, as duly noted by renowned paleontologists (the late) Stephen Gould and Niles Eldridge, implies that thousands, and sometimes millions of years of stasis (followed by rapid speciation) are the norm throughout our pre-history. Gould remarks, “Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless.” Hardly the gradual, methodical, innumerable, change taking place over countless intermediary species, predicted by Darwin. This fact is still quite the persistent source of embarrassment for neo-Darwinians, as it was for Darwin himself.

@ 14:00 and following, what we see—and this has been discussed at length—is that proponents of Darwinian gradualism, like Dr. Tyson, point to examples of fur color selection—white will give northern bears a stealth advantage, brown favors the southern bear—as evidence for the profound mechanism of change that brought bears into existence in the first place, and indeed, shaped all of nature’s variety. The fact that lighter bears produced lighter offspring, because of some heritable trait, constitutes the type of “momentous transformation” often heralded, by Darwinists, as irrefutable evidence in support of the notion that your not so distant progenitor was Poison Ivy, or perhaps, a dandelion. Couple this pre-supposition with the notion that all life, and indeed the universe itself, arose spontaneously from nothing, and you have yourself quite a narrative; one that the writers of Genesis—if they were alive today—would be quite envious of.

@7:52 Neil proclaims, “In a blink of cosmic time, just 15 or 20 thousand years, we turned gray wolves into all the kinds of dogs… Think about it, every breed of dog you've ever seen was sculpted by human hands.” Now that you've mentioned it Dr. Tyson, this is a fascinating example, which stands in stark contrast to the directionless efforts of natural selection we infer from the fossil record. NS is not only glacially slow, by comparison, but also relatively impotent. NS was only able to elicit trivial changes in wolf populations during tens of thousands of years of human pre-history. This evidence suggests that without intelligent intervention we would have, at best, only a few examples of naturally motivated evolutionary changes in Canis lupus. This hardly constitutes a triumph for Darwinian evolution.

The climax of this evolutionary theme is reached @ 9:50 of the program, where Neil—not unlike Buzz Light-year—invites us to explore “…the microcosms, where one kind of life can be transformed into another!” On cue, he guides us from the microscopic confines of a bear’s reproductive organs to the external macroscopic level, where the “dramatic” evolutionary transformation is evident: random genetic change, according to Tyson, has afforded bears with lighter fur—which enhances stealth in arctic environs—the means by which to thrive and to reproduce. These seemingly trivial changes in fur color presumably constitute an evolutionary triumph—or so the story goes. Ardent Darwinists, like Professor Tyson, inform us that when the less fit darker bears die off—or migrate south—the result is a population advantage for white bears over brown; and, subsequently, as the two groups of bears become geographically and (perhaps) genetically isolated, the one species will—and has—become two.

Truth is, Kodiak bears and Polar bears—once thought to be wholly separate species—have recently been discovered to have produced fertile hybrid offspring; the two can and apparently do interbreed. The species distinction seems to be an arbitrary one in this case, at least. So when Tyson and other naturalists deride "creationists" for believing that God created all these "thousands of species separately," he would do well to remember the subjectivity of these naming conventions. If this type of relational behavior continues with regularity—perhaps because of climate change or some other phenomenon—then a sort of devolution will take place: the populations will merge once again. Of course presenting evidence of this nature would perhaps cast doubt on the strength of the presumed "fact" of evolution; consequently, it is unlikely to be featured on programs like Cosmos. If pigmentary modifications are an evolutionary triumph, then I suppose the merging of bear populations would constitute a resounding defeat for Darwinian naturalists. I digress. In the end, methodical naturalism may indeed prove to be capable of producing all the known species of animals we know. Fur color changes don't hardly provide definitive evidence for that proposition.

The link from the present state, to where bears originate, is not even up for questioning. On Dr. Tyson’s view, these kinds of minor changes, within isolated populations, extrapolated over eons of time will engender profound transformations in creatures of all kinds, much like those imposed by humans on canus lupus. For even the casual onlooker, it is quite easy to see we are not talking here about the kind of change necessary to produce bears or lions or elephants in the first place. The sheer magnitude of small modifications necessary to produce a man from a mollusk is not only different in degree, but—it seems to me—a wholly different kind of alteration problem. @15:20 the good professor reminds us that, “Mutations are entirely random, and happen all the time.” They had better, because time is surely of the essence when hoping to manufacture an aborigine from an amoeba.

There are a number of other issues, I have, with the second rendition of the Cosmos series: not the least of which is the fact that Tyson sets up and knocks down quite a few strawmen in the episode. Probably, the most prominent of these is discussed around the 21:30 mark of the 2^nd episode. Here, Neil states, erroneously “…the prevailing belief was that…an intelligent designer, who created each of…millions of species…separately... ” Notice how Dr. Tyson takes the opportunity to unnecessarily goad ID proponents in that statement?  Aside from the obvious fact that no one—perhaps a few—has ever believed that God created species in such a static and immutable fashion that they would remain identical to their parents. This simplistic idea would be discredited within a generation or two of observation. Thinly veiled insults, like those employed here, aren't likely to increase our understanding of the subject. Moreover, the statement drips of Irony, considering the fact that Tyson’s chosen example—selective breeding—entails intelligent designers.

In his following statement, Dr. Neil Degrasse Tyson addresses another contention, that many believed “the designs were too intricate…to be the result of unguided evolution…” Interestingly enough, Neil’s construal here has some merit. It is still the case today, that some indeed believe designs, like the eye, and wing, are too intricate to be the result of time, plus matter, plus chance. And that the oversimplified version of eye evolution depicted in this episode elides over many pertinent details; it is almost laughable. This is why it is suggested by Discovery Institute, and others, that information based models be considered, in addition to the purely mechanistic, materialistic, view of Darwinian evolution. I am a firm believer that these models, which see information—like that in DNA and RNA—as paramount, will eventually replace the prevailing and, I think, outmoded views of the Darwinian evolutionary paradigm. There is much more to say on this topic and on episode 2 for sure; suffice it to say, however, that the rest of the program is dedicated to the idea that life arises easily and frequently, and that the universe is replete with other kinds of life. Needless to say, this is quite a leap of faith, based on even more unfalsifiable assumptions like those found in episode 1.